Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a vehicle position detector that can detect an own-vehicle position with high precision, and an automatic steering controller that controls automatic driving of a vehicle on the basis of the own-vehicle position.
Description of the Background Art
Recent years have seen the development of self-driving vehicles that compute a target driving route using own-vehicle position information and map information that are highly precise and obtained from satellites and then can be automatically driven along the target driving route.
Although the automatic driving is predicated upon obtainment of highly precise own-vehicle position information, the position data obtained from satellites is subject to the environment surrounding the vehicle and thus a position jump by which the data largely alters may occur.
In order to address such a position jump, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2013-122406 discloses a technique for detecting a position jump of an object by calculating an estimated position of the object and calculating a difference between the estimated position and a measured position obtained from a satellite.
When the position jump is detected, the own-vehicle position is corrected. In Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2013-122406, the processes require time longer than the update cycle of satellite information, thus causing a problem in that precise own-vehicle position information cannot be obtained over a long period of time.
Furthermore, the correction of the own-vehicle position may consequently influence the automatic steering (steering operation) of the self-driving vehicles that perform automatic driving on the basis of own-vehicle position information, and destabilize the vehicle behavior such as occurrence of sudden route change.